EVB gets nod for William St work

Staff South Glen­garry coun­cil awarded the job to pro­vide ar­chi­tec­tural and en­gi­neer­ing ser­vices for the re­con­struc­tion of a seg­ment of William Street in Williamstown to EVB En­gi­neer­ing.

The Corn­wall-based firm’s sub­mis­sion of $24,953 plus HST was the sec­ond low­est of six re­ceived by the town­ship by the Novem­ber 8 dead­line.

Town­ship gen­eral man­ager of in­fra­struc­ture ser­vices Ewen MacDon­ald said at the most re­cent coun­cil meet­ing there were con­cerns with the low­est bid­der, HSP En­gi­neer­ing, whose sub­mis­sion was $13,423 plus HST.

“We did not feel that their ex­per­tise was in roads de­sign and con­struc­tion,” Mr. MacDon­ald told coun­cil. “This firm has worked for us in the past, but they are more of a struc­tural or ar­chi­tec­tural firm, for build­ings and so on. When we re­viewed it, they didn't have a whole lot of rel­e­vant ex­pe­ri­ence.”

He added that EVB not only scored the high­est in his depart­ment's eval­u­a­tion ma­trix ex­er­cise, but that the firm “has the qual­i­fi­ca­tions and the engi­neers that have the spe­cific ex­per­tise,” par­tic­u­larly when it comes to the storm sewer de­sign and re­con­struc­tion facet of the pro­ject.

The William Street pro­ject, con­sist­ing of three-quar­ters of a kilo­me­tre of road work and sewer re­place­ment from County Road 19 to the Peanut Line Trail, will cost ap­prox­i­mately $1.3 mil­lion.

Pre­lim­i­nary de­sign plans for the work are sched­uled to be done by March.

“The (re­con­struc­tion) pro­ject is to be com­pleted by Sep­tem­ber, so we'll be ten­der­ing in the early part of the spring. At that point, we'll also be able to ad­vise coun­cil of the (ex­act) cost of the pro­ject, based on the de­sign,” he added.